To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Star Trek’s television premiere, the United States Postal Service is issuing four bold new stamps. The “Star Trek Forever” series features four digital illustrations, including the USS Enterprise (NCC-1701) set against an outline of the Starfleet insignia, the silhouette of a crewman in a transporter, the silhouette of the Enterprise, and the Enterprise set against an outline of Mr. Spock’s famous Vulcan salute.
“The new Star Trek stamps showcase four digital illustrations inspired by classic elements of the television program,” USPS writes on its site. No release date for the new Star Trek stamps has been announced.
Each stamp features a different color influenced by Starfleet uniforms: the command division’s green and gold, security and operations’ red, and science and medical’s blue. The stamps were designed by four heads of state under the art direction of Antonio Alcalá. The stamps will also feature the iconic opening of Captain James T. Kirk’s (William Shatner) famous introductory monologue: “Space … the final frontier.”
Star Trek: The Original Series first aired in 1966 and ran until 1969. After its third-season cancellation, it became an enormous hit in 1970s syndication. The series’ ’60s feel can be seen in the design of these stamps.
This is not the first time that the hit science fiction franchise has appeared on a stamp. In September 1999, The Original Series was honored in USPS’ “Celebrate the Century” series. It cost 33 cents at the time. The current price for Forever stamps stands at 49 cents.
The Star Trek franchise includes The Original Series and four television spinoffs, two film series — including the reboots that premiered in 2009 — and an animated series. Countless novels, comic books, and fan-made media have come along for the ride, and a huge amount of merchandise.
2016 also marks the release of a new film from Paramount, Star Trek Beyond, directed by Justin Lin. It will hit theaters on July 22.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?